1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method for searching information which is available on the World Wide Web, called internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
The internet is a worldwide network comprising more and more information each day. According to the philosophy of the internet, this growing flow of information actually is controlled and regulated by nobody, and there are no intermediaries.
The consequence thereof is that nobody can obtain a survey of the growing flow of information which is presented on the internet.
If one wants to search certain information and does not know the right place where the information is located, then one may recur to a so-called search robot, this is a search program which can scour the internet in search of the requested information, but a disadvantage connected to this search robot consists in that it searches only in a part of all the present information, such in the part of which the search robot has made an index. In consideration of the fact that the information on the internet is growing day by day, the index of the search robot always is outdated.
Moreover, the result of a search action performed by a search robot comprises a lot of redundant information which scarcely has anything to do with the submitted request, which is caused by the fact that a search engine actually is very stupid and does not understand relations and terms which seem very simple to us. For the search robot, the question must be posed very accurately in order to obtain useful results.
Moreover, it is mostly so that the person looking for information only looks at the first search results of the search robot, and therefore only the best-positioned search results are used.
In case that there are not many links to a well-defined internet site, it will also be difficult for the search robot to find the information concerned. Therefore, a high number of links coupled to an internet site increases the possibility of success during searching, as the information can be obtained in several ways.
An additional problem is that there are many data bases which are concealed behind a certain internet address and in which the search engine can not start searching directly. First, one has to log in on the data base concerned before it can be consulted. Thus, one first has to know all present data bases which one possibly may consult.
There are already search robots which are directed towards very specific thematic fields, however, the disadvantage thereof is that, due to the limited field of knowledge thereof, one can not rely thereon for search tasks not situated within that field of knowledge.
Further, one may consult so-called web catalogues or directories, but these have the disadvantage that they do not remain up-to-date and that the quality thereof depends on the editor. If one has no keywords for very special terms or fields, the search only makes sense for a limited field.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,958,014 discloses a method for establishing a data connection between a computer and a live agent selected from an agent pool. An agent queuing manager receives the request of a user and selects an appropriate live agent from the pool. These agents are specialists in their technical domain and give advice to the user in their domain. These agents are no specialists in searching on the internet and are not using search engines.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,563,805 discloses a method for providing assistance to a user in a distributed area processing system. This assistance also is not related to searching information on internet.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,223,165 discloses a method using a server unit which can store and display the names and characteristics of experts and assist in connecting an expert and a customer for real-time communication. The server can tell the customer how to contact an expert and shows for instance a list of available experts on the PC of the customer.